Disillusional

  (Book of BOB, Chapter 2)I woke in the hum of the white room,

  walls breathing antiseptic lies.

  They said the Beast was gone—

  a leash of lithium, a crown of volts,

  parents’ mercy, doctors’ science. But the Beast never left.

  It just learned to wear my face. I see it in the mirror’s fracture:

  a smile stitched from old photographs,

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  eyes that blink on someone else’s cue.

  They call this recovery.

  I call it camouflage. The memories return like thieves,

  slipping through the cracks the shock left open.

  Not gentle reunions—

  they kick down doors,

  drag me by the collar into rooms I swore were locked. Mother’s voice: “He’s better now.”

  Father’s nod: “Safer this way.”

  The surgeon’s calm: “Minimal tissue loss.”

  All of them actors in the same play,

  and I’m the prop they keep repainting. Electrocution didn’t kill the Beast.

  It taught it language.

  Now it speaks in my voice,

  whispers you are healed

  while sharpening claws behind my ribs. I trace the scar along my skull,

  a lightning bolt frozen mid-strike.

  This is not a wound.

  This is a doorway. They think I’m piecing myself together.

  They’re wrong.

  I’m taking the pieces apart,

  one by one,

  until I find the part that was never theirs to fix. Disillusional, they label me.

  Good.

  Let them keep their illusions.

  I’m busy building something real

  from the wreckage of their cure.